Dr. MedLaw

All doctors need some coverage help, but to avoid legal issues, it’s important to be clear and know the practices of the groups you partner with....

Nov 29, 2023

The doctors who serve on peer review committees must speak and act freely without fear of retaliation, therefore members often receive legal protections....

Nov 20, 2023

If every patient is unique, can an overarching metric really be pinned down enough to declare that a given doctor was negligent as a legal certainty?...

Nov 02, 2023

Any discussion with doctors about avoiding liability for malpractice is hampered from the start because “negligence” is a very charged term. It conjures up images of a slipshod and b...

Sep 20, 2023

Q: A cardiology fellow at my hospital is very good, and I would like to bring him into my practice when he completes training. However, I want to keep my options open, and he is unsure wheth...

Sep 14, 2023

Dr. MedLaw explains why physicians must avoid any payment-for-business schemes with healthcare service providers....

Sep 07, 2023

Q: A patient’s daughter, a high school senior, had accompanied her mother for her semi-annual eye examination. The daughter was very attentive to what I was doing and told me that she woul...

Aug 24, 2023

The term “peer review” embodies what the evaluation of a doctor should be: an assessment by other physicians. However, it can be co-opted by personal grievance or business competition, a...

Jul 20, 2023

Q: I was recently contacted about consulting for a medical malpractice law firm. This might lead to serving as an expert witness in a trial, but it is currently about reviewing charts, maki...

Jul 11, 2023

Q: A new patient became abusive after I refused to prescribe narcotics for a back injury that he claimed but was undocumented and undetectable. He stormed out. Then in the morning, we came i...

Jul 07, 2023

Q: As a family practitioner, I include a breast examination on a standard physical. About 3 years ago, I noticed what felt like a thickened area in the upper outer quadrant of a patient’s ...

Jun 13, 2023

Although judges will often claim, as John Roberts famously did, that they “only call balls and strikes”, casting themselves as neutral umpires of rarefied law, the reality is that judici...

Jun 08, 2023

Q: I’m still have a lot of loan debt so I’m doing some shifts in an urgicare to help pay that off.  I saw a patient yesterday for cramps and vomiting.  He was insisting that he had foo...

May 10, 2023

Q: I’m a physiatrist so a lot of my patients have ongoing lawsuits over slip-and-falls and MVA’s and we get lots of requests for records. We check that the request came with a HIPAA-comp...

May 04, 2023

Q: The colonoscopist at a private endoscopy center perforated a patient’s transverse colon. The patient was immediately transferred to our hospital and our on-call surgeon did the repair. ...

Apr 20, 2023

The National Practitioner Data Bank was established as a nationwide information resource, intended to prevent a doctor with practice or conduct problems from just moving to another area to c...

Mar 21, 2023

Q: One of my MS patients just asked me what would happen if a drug he is using got pulled from the market. He is now stabilized after some rocky periods and is fearful that this could be los...

Feb 21, 2023

Q: In my family practice I occasionally encounter pregnant patients who are interested in VBAC but have had some difficulty in finding a doctor or center that will accommodate them.  I Goog...

Feb 14, 2023

Q: I have a patient who needs a carpal tunnel release. My problem is that this procedure is most safely done after stopping anti-coagulation and her cardiologist wants her to only be off her...

Feb 07, 2023

Ask a doctor if they can be sued for what might happen in the future, and they likely will say, “Of course, it happens all the time!” Most doctors have some version of the, actually apoc...

Jan 10, 2023